A group of leading House Democrats introduced legislation Monday requiring the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to conduct an assessment of its workforce to determine whether it’s up to the task after the exit of around 1,000 employees during President Donald Trump’s second term.

The concept of a force structure assessment is more common in military branches, including one that Congress previously ordered for Cyber Command. The CISA Force Structure Assessment Act would order the agency to carry out a review of whether the agency still has the necessary personnel, training and certifications after budget cuts and other Trump-era departures.

“America’s cyber defenses are only as strong as the people behind them,” Rep. James Walkinshaw, the Virginia Democrat serving as lead sponsor of the bill, said in a news release. “As cyber threats grow more sophisticated and technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing reshape the threat landscape, Congress needs a clear accounting of whether CISA has the workforce, skills, and resources required to keep Americans safe and enable mission delivery. This legislation will identify critical gaps and give Congress concrete information to address them.”

Also sponsoring the bill are the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, and the top Democrat on its cybersecurity subcommittee, Delia Ramirez, D-Ill.

Additional elements of the force structure assessmewould include a review of the security of federal IT systems and support for state and local governments; the risks posed by AI, quantum computing and other cutting edge technologies; CISA’s threat-hunting and incident response capabilities; support for critical infrastructure and operating technology, including CISA’s role as a sector risk management agency for a number of industry sectors; the operation of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative; and international cooperation.

Some lawmakers and other observers have worried those areas have been greatly impacted by staffing cuts, ultimately hurting CISA’s ability to carry out its core functions.

Ramirez dinged GOP lawmakers for “a lack of interest in safeguarding our nation’s cybersecurity and our residents’ civil rights and privacy” in going along with the CISA cuts and other developments at the Department of Homeland Security.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have voiced concern about the scope of cuts at CISA, but Republicans have approved some of them while pushing back on others. CISA itself is currently seeking to hire hundreds of new personnel, even as its latest budget blueprint calls for yet more funding reductions.

“With Iran targeting our critical infrastructure and frontier AI models creating new cyber risks, we must ensure we have a cybersecurity workforce to counter these growing threats,” Thompson said. “After Trump has spent the past two years targeting and slashing CISA’s workforce, we need the agency to assess if it has [the] right personnel in place to fulfill its mission.”

National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross has discussed White House plans to develop a cybersecurity academy meant to consolidate and enhance existing federal cyber training and education programs, with the aim of addressing cyber workforce shortages. His office has reportedly drafted an executive order that would establish that academy.

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A new bipartisan Senate bill would require federal regulators to prepare the U.S. electric grid for cybersecurity threats from quantum computers and create a technical sandbox to study how the technology could impact  both information and operational technology systems.

The Quantum Grid Utility Assurance and Resilient Defense (Quantum-GUARD) Act, introduced by Sens. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Chris Coons, D-Del., would direct the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission when reviewing proposed reliability regulatory standards for electricity owners and operators under the Federal Power Act.

FERC updates its reliability standards to account for emerging cybersecurity concerns, and the legislation would expand those reviews to include the future threat of hacks from quantum computers.

The legislation also directs FERC to explore potential uses of post-quantum cryptography in IT and OT systems and “take such action the Commission determines to be appropriate based on that consideration.”

In a statement, Coons said quantum computing brings “new economic opportunities” along with “tremendous cybersecurity risks.”

“As the technology races forward and our adversaries continue to seek vulnerabilities in our critical systems, we need to pass the Quantum-GUARD Act to ensure our government is using every available tool to meet this threat,” said Coons.

The federal government has been an early adopter of post-quantum cryptography for its digital systems. The National Institute for Standards and Technology has worked with cryptographers to develop new “post-quantum” encryption algorithms that will be used by most governments and the private sector.

Under the Biden administration, most federal agencies were required to migrate their systems and data to “PQC” encryption by 2035. In June, an executive order from the Trump administration pushed that timeline up to 2030. 

Ali Shaikh, CEO of Graphiant, a networking infrastructure startup, told CyberScoop that the bill would represent a good start in terms of pushing greater adoption of quantum-resistant encryption, “the real work is upgrading infrastructure, not applications, ahead of the deadlines.”

Evgeny Gervis, CEO of SafeLogic, compared the energy sector’s challenges to previous efforts by FERC and industry to gain adoption at scale for other technological upgrades, like smart grid equipment. Among those challenges is prioritizing security upgrades in a sector where reliability is paramount.

“The highest priority for electric utilities will be preservation of integrity and availability, both services that are widely supported by legacy public key cryptographic controls that are quantum vulnerable,” said Gervis. “It is essential that quantum computers do not undermine the integrity and authenticity of SCADA communications or the software update process.“

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One of the most difficult obstacles to overcome in the quantum race will be the supply chain, given how diffuse it is, a top White House official said Wednesday.

“Supply chain is one of the biggest challenges in my mind, and really, the challenge with the quantum supply chain is that quantum is not defined by a single hardware platform,” said Brad Blakestad, director of the National Quantum Coordination Office within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

“If you look at the quantum computing technologies, the quantum sensing technologies, the networking — those are all different,” he said in a webinar hosted by Inside Cybersecurity and USTelecom. “And even within computing, there’s seven different modalities that use completely different components. So we have this not just one monolithic supply chain, but just a bunch of different supply chains that are kind of intertwined in various ways.”

Blakestad made his remarks a little more than a month after President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on quantum computing. He referenced proposed ways to address the supply chain challenge in one of the orders.

“The other major issue or challenge that we face right now is that we’re on the cusp of quantum exploding from a commercialization perspective, but we’re not quite there yet,” he said. “So there’s not the funding, the revenue coming from large-scale quantum companies at this point to really make the supply chain as robust as you would want. So thinking about it from the government perspective, it’s just [that] there are too many places that I would want to bolster and not enough funding to do it.”

Blakestad touted steps to help that along such as the government buying widgets from a company that makes them to certain specifications, or prize challenges.

The quantum supply chain isn’t just diffuse in the United States, an International Institute for Strategic Studies policy paper noted Wednesday. It’s “inherently international: no single country dominates the supply chain, whether specialised materials, cryogenic equipment, hardware, software, fabrication or algorithms,” the authors, Dongyoun Cho and Maria Shagina, wrote.

And a March report from the Center for a New American Security identified strengthening the quantum supply chain as pivotal to the United States seizing the benefits of the technology, citing gaps in the U.S. supply chain and reliance on foreign suppliers such as China and Russia. 

Supply chain wasn’t the only obstacle Blakestad mentioned as looming large.

“The encryption challenge is a real challenge, and we want to make sure that we are aware of when quantum computers will ultimately get to a scale that they start having these sorts of implications and move as quickly as we can,” he said. “So, just by owning the technologies, by owning the workforce, by making the United States the place that people want to come to be on the cutting edge of this technology, I think that kind of addresses both of those issues, and that’s what makes it so critical.”

Another difficulty is measuring progress, Blakestad said: “It’s also very, very hard to benchmark, and to know that you’re actually doing what you’re supposed to, what you are intending to do.”

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